#eva saulitis

[whitefangz]

1,8,14!

1. Song of the year?

MAN idk in terms of time spent listening lets get married by bleachers was my #1 for the second year in a row but my brain really wants to say safety first by left at london

8. Game of the year?

like everyone and their mother is going to say this but i also have to say animal crossing new horizons like. i spent entire days JUST playing that in march and april

14. Favorite book you read this year?

UMM HSGFS god i think i genuinely read like ONE book total this year and it was into great silence by eva saulitis. i liked it though, if anyone is interested in killer whales i would recommend it to them

thank u for the ask !

[dylan20]

The Eyak word for rain means “something is happening.” 

--Eva Saulitis, Into Great Silence, p. 230

This sentence appears near the end of the book, where Saulitis talks about the Eyak people of the coastal rainforest of Alaska. 

The Eyak are a distinct cultural group, separate from the Tlingit, who migrated thousands of years ago from the interior to the coast. Saulitis writes that their language is unrelated to the Tlingit -- instead, it is related to Interior Athabascan, and to the Navajo-Apache languages of the desert Southwest. It is a bit of a mysterious arrival to the Alaskan coast, in other words.

The last native speaker of Eyak, Chief Marie Smith Jones, died in the 2000s, so the language is not spoken any more.

"Chief Marie [said] that when she died she didn't really believe the language would go extinct, because the language comes from the land, and as long as the land, water, and animals survive, as long as the place survives, the language exists in its elemental form. Like a bulb, like a spore, like a rootstock, it lies dormant, waiting. Perhaps it will take a new kind of listening, of living close to the place, to bring Eyak back, 'to start all over again.'"

[cinematic-literature]

First Reformed (2017) by Paul Schrader

Book title: Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas (2013) by Eva Saulitis

[exceptindreams]

Prayer 48 | Eva Saulitis

"Prayer 48" Eva Saulitis

for Asja

In predawn dark, a rat falling from a rafter is a dollop, wind a whir, and suddenly I'm remembering my mother teaching me to bake her hot water sponge cake.

How we whipped the egg whites with the electric mixer until stiff peaks formed. How she warned me not to allow a single thread of yolk to taint the white, or the cake

would fail. To fold white into yolk-sugar-flour was slow, patient. She let me carve a wedge with the rubber spatula, drop it to the batter's surface, then lift from the bowl's bottom

up and over the dollop, turning it in. Warned me never to beat or mix or even stir—the cake would fall. Once, dinking around, I stuck a wooden spoon into

the still-whirring beaters, bent the metal, splintered the spoon into the batter. Once I cut her grandmother's precious lace for a doll's clothes, and she cried, the savaged pieces

draped across her wrists. So many times I tried to shove my peasant feet into her dainty pumps, hand into her evening gloves. One spoon at a time, that first thin layer drawn across

the airy white forming a little hill. Folding only just enough. The batter growing lighter by increments. It was mostly space we folded in, taming down

the cloy. It was never so good as then, licked off the finer, the cake itself, to me, disappointing, layers smeared with homemade jam, topped with a stiff merengue.

Never so good as then, her instructing, trying to domesticate my impertinence, teach me a little grace, me resisting, the sweet on my tongue dissolving so easily

in that state of matter. Never so good as straight from the Pyrex bowl. Never so gentle as the slide of batter into an angel food pan. The rest up to her, what she

created from the baked version, brown on top and bottom. Here I am, decades later sitting uner the halogen of a full moon, and that moment, which was many

folded into one, is so pure and specific, the sugar sharp on my tongue, the spatula pushing as if through an undertow. My mother taught me to fold. Never so

sweet as now. We were incorporating lightness into a deep bowl. As some bird—probably an owl out hunting—chacks its was across the lawn,

sounding like a key chain, and now the garden sprinkler comes on, so I know it's 6:00 a.m. There's the first hint of dawn slow-dissolving one more night. This is a fifty-

year-old love. It's heavy, so I fold in moonlight, the sound of water spattered on leaves. Dim stars, bright moon— our lives. The cake imperfect, but finished.

—12.17.2013

[animalia-metazoa]

Each day that followed abided by a seesaw template of empowerment and frustration, eagerness and worry, mirrored by the weather, which changed constantly.

Eva Saulitis from Into Great Silence (Cut Loose- p.33)

[littletonofun]

[llogelepsy]

Prayer 48

BY EVA SAULITIS 

In predawn dark, a rat falling from a rafter is a dollop, wind a whir, and suddenly I'm remembering my mother teaching me to bake her hot water sponge cake.

How we whipped the egg whites with the electric mixer until stiff peaks formed. How she warned me not to allow a single thread of yolk to taint the white, or the cake

would fail. To fold white into yolk-sugar-flour was slow, patient. She let me carve a wedge with the rubber spatula, drop it to the batter's surface, then lift from the bowl's bottom

up and over the dollop, turning it in. Warned me never to beat or mix or even stir—the cake would fall. Once, dinking around, I stuck a wooden spoon into

the still-whirring beaters, bent the metal, splintered the spoon into the batter. Once I cut her grandmother's precious lace for a doll's clothes, and she cried, the savaged pieces

draped across her wrists. So many times I tried to shove my peasant feet into her dainty pumps, hand into her evening gloves. One spoon at a time, that first thin layer drawn across

the airy white forming a little hill. Folding only just enough. The batter growing lighter by increments. It was mostly space we folded in, taming down

the cloy. It was never so good as then, licked off the finer, the cake itself, to me, disappointing, layers smeared with homemade jam, topped with a stiff merengue.

Never so good as then, her instructing, trying to domesticate my impertinence, teach me a little grace, me resisting, the sweet on my tongue dissolving so easily

in that state of matter. Never so good as straight from the Pyrex bowl. Never so gentle as the slide of batter into an angel food pan. The rest up to her, what she

created from the baked version, brown on top and bottom. Here I am, decades later sitting uner the halogen of a full moon, and that moment, which was many

folded into one, is so pure and specific, the sugar sharp on my tongue, the spatula pushing as if through an undertow. My mother taught me to fold. Never so

sweet as now. We were incorporating lightness into a deep bowl. As some bird—probably an owl out hunting—chacks its was across the lawn,

sounding like a key chain, and now the garden sprinkler comes on, so I know it's 6:00 a.m. There's the first hint of dawn slow-dissolving one more night. This is a fifty-

year-old love. It's heavy, so I fold in moonlight, the sound of water spattered on leaves. Dim stars, bright moon— our lives. The cake imperfect, but finished.

[fungiboy]

“Translated into numbers: what we give ourselves permission to say, to claim as knowledge. Our caution.”

[godrevy]

He seems, like me, honey-slowed by winter's shortest days, clumsy and isolated.

EVA SAULITIS, from “Prayer 2″

[the-only-mainstream]

https://orionmagazine.org/article/eva-saulitis-reads-wild-darkness/

h/t mellowtrouble

Note: link.

[poetry365days]

PRAYER 2 No one wants another paean to a rosy dawn, so it's good this one's bluish, baby-shade at the horizon, bleeding up into midnight like a botched dye job. And having enough of the old world—larks, crakes, nightingales, storks—this space is populated by one fly crabbing across a notebook page. He seems, like me, honey-slowed by winter's shortest days, clumsy and isolated. My love bought a black-and-white photo once, close-up of a birch trunk, fly crawling up the curled paper bark, marring the purity of the image. You don't notice the fly until you do, and then you can't stop. No one wants a fly in art, but there it is, elegantly framed. And we're over the epic, so here, first thing this morning, a pedestrian quarrel. Years ago, I flew across a mountain range in black coat and black boots to secretly meet him in the city. How many dawns did it take to arrive at this particular? At 9:30 the sky flares not like flame—a paper fan you buy in Chinatown for a dollar. A sudden breeze sways the Tibetan flags strung along the eaves. I never noticed how thin the fabric. You can see right through the printed prayers to the thermometer— five degrees—and beyond, birches leaning all to windward. Sun bleaches out the last mysterious. Now we pray to the real.                                                             —11.29.2012

Eva Saulitis

[gbpr]

Facing death in a death-phobic culture is lonely. But in wild places like Prince William Sound or the woods and sloughs behind my house, it is different. The salmon dying in their stream tell me I am not alone. The evidence is everywhere: in the skull of an immature eagle I found in the woods; in the bones of a moose in the gully below my house; in the corpse of a wasp on the windowsill; in the fall of a birch leaf from its branch. These things tell me death is true, right, graceful; not tragic, not failure, not defeat. For this you were born, writes Stanley Kunitz

Read more: http://www.utne.com/mind-and-body/facing-death-zm0z14fzsau.aspx#ixzz3Kc7TNKWJ

A perspective that I don't often encounter but one that rings true. 

[animalia-metazoa]

Alone I wandered between worlds, the objective world of species, natural history and names, and the subjective world of symbols and signs.

Eva Saulitis from Into Great Silence (Whale Camp- p. 21)

[dryapricotears-blog]

You Darkness │Eva Saulitis

October darkness (can't) take me in, tap at my window, lure me to your half-bitten frost-light (rose fringe) over new snow, over mountain snout, sleep, gentle, open your mouth, you my lord of leaf fall (of whitening), take this, (unforgiven) down the trail through meadows, down the eroded gully (my thoughts) and as I watch (softest parts flushing) most horizon, cold to the edge— ridgeline—glacial tongue, take my mind, darkness (that I cannot love) & I'll step into the alders, under the goshawk's killing tree (above me, looking through & past —flayed beneath—picked clean) be not so pretty, so pink, erasure who unfolds, holds this (madness) pressed in the swale, creek bed (jealous lover) take me cold and hard. Still this (something) comes (not) asking for my logical, into this (my private), demon lover you are below the horizon, blue as a black eye.

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Eva Saulitis is an essayist, poet, and marine biologist, has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Alaska for 25 years. Her first book was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize and the ForeWord Book Award.

[therumpus]

a place where knowing ends, where language founders, where the wind carries off all her word endings. Remember that edge, ships plunging off explorer’s maps, & someone’s marked the margin: Here there be … ? But the crucial part’s worn away–?

From Eva Saulitis's collection of poems Many Ways To Say It, reviewed by Michelle Salcido at The Rumpus.

[fungiboy]

Before I knew there was such thing as species, much less one that was endangered, I understood extinction